Try Web Workers

How I learn about web workers by writing a simple example.

Demo

Two workers sharing and manipulating the same i:

1. worker1: Run i = i + 3 every 4 seconds and update
2. worker2: Run i = i - 1 every 2 seconds and update

Background

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been too busy to update my blog. What I originally planned to do during this time was to start a project about mobile robots. Although not even a single line was written, I still did some research to see what I need to learn. Among these, one thing I want to try first is the web workers.

Today I finally have some free time to write something by pretending there’s no urgent work to do, so now I’m controlling my personal laptop remotely from hotel!

Idea

Web workers runs in their own threads, and can communicate with the main thread via the postMessage() method and the onmessage event handler. So I think it would be possible to use web workers similarly as ROS nodes, and the main thread as ROS core. Following this concept, I can put different components, e.g. planning, control, perception, decision, etc., into seperate workers, and reuse the paradigm of ROS.

Anyway, this is the big idea. This post is just a naive try…

Code

Available on my GitHub repository.